Robert Alan Beuth

Robert Alan Beuth (born ) is an American actor, artist, and dramatist best known for portraying television character roles, with more than 50 to his name over a career now spanning four decades. He has worked prolifically in both comedy and drama, but is most notable for portraying the role of Mueller on two seasons of the syndicated talk-show spoof Night Stand with Dick Dietrick, in 1996 and 1997. Beuth also has an extensive repertoire in commercials, in feature films, and (in particular) on stage, where his work encompasses acting, playwriting, and – most renownedly – the design and sculpting of theatrical masks and puppets.

Life and career Early life Beuth was born on , in Albany, New York, third of four children to Philip R. Beuth, a program director at television station WTEN, and Elizabeth C. née Yost, a homemaker. There, Beuth attended Tenaya Junior High School accordingly, Beuth quickly became a fixture in the Fresno Community Theater's children's program. and was singled out for particularly rave reviews for his performance as the Cowardly Lion in their staging of The Wizard of Oz that December.

Following his high school graduation, Beuth briefly joined the Good Company Players, a dinner theater troupe operating out of the Fresno Hilton, before enrolling in the theater program at Fresno State University. A highlight of his two-year Beuth also continued his work with the Fresno Community Theater during this time, garnering a Best Character Actor award for his turn as Herod in their production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

After leaving Fresno State in 1977, Beuth relocated to New York City and a headline-making star turn in the Lake George Dinner Theatre's staging of Greater Tuna), Beuth later described this period of his life as a "jump into obscurity", and worked for three years Beuth left New York for Los Angeles to try his hand in earnest at television acting. He initially regarded the move solely as a means of earning enough exposure and name recognition to one day return to the New York stage; just after Hogan's breakout role in Crocodile Dundee. Notwithstanding this new dimension to his career, Beuth still managed to retain a presence on the live stage, principally as a player in the Sunday Company of the improv and sketch comedy troupe The Groundlings. Beuth's role as Mueller would continue for the remainder of the series' two-season run, totaling 72 episodes in all.

In the years since the cancellation of Night Stand, Beuth has continued to accumulate a lengthy résumé of television work. A notable highlight of his later career is Slanted, a 2010 comedic web series created by Andrea Lwin and adapted from her autobiographical one-woman show of the same name, which chronicled her life as a second-generation Chinese-American aspiring to be a Hollywood actress. Beuth took an integral part in conceiving and developing the character of sleazy talent agent Marty Phister, which he played for two of the series' six episodes and for which he received an award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series at the 2011 LAWebFest.

Feature films Beuth has also acted in a number of feature films over the course of his career, again generally in small character roles, including Hollywood blockbusters such as When Harry Met Sally..., In the Line of Fire, and Outbreak. New York Times critic Janet Maslin credited Beuth's appearance as mill worker Cy Ippeston in the 1990 horror movie Graveyard Shift for helping lend a certain "quirky appeal" to an otherwise uneven film adaptation of Stephen King's identically-titled short story.

Playwriting Beuth's most notable effort as a playwright is Stories of the Season, which he created and wrote in collaboration with Robert George Harrison, an old acquaintance from his community theater days in Fresno. and in the years since has itself become something of a holiday tradition among Southern California's theatrical community. Subsequent revivals have been staged locally by the Gascon Theater Center and the Echo Theater Company, and the show has also occasionally been taken on the road to out-of-town destinations such as Santa Fe, New Mexico and Stony Brook, New York.

In 2003, Beuth followed up the success of Stories of the Season with a second dramatic effort, In the Valley of the Mist, again with Harrison as co-writer. Using 55 custom-designed puppets and masks In July 2026, with financial sponsorship from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, Huckleberry Finn was revived for an additional two-week run at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut.

Sculpture Aside from performance, Beuth's career as an artist mainly takes the form of the design and fabrication of theatrical masks and puppets, an interest that began while he was at the Fresno Community Theater. There, in addition to acting in the troupe, he was also employed as a custodian for the Fresno Memorial Auditorium, and thus had access to storage rooms where set elements and props were kept: an experience he likened to "a kid [being given] the keys to Disneyland at night". However, Beuth did not begin pursuing the craft in earnest until 1981, when he answered an ad that had been placed in a trade publication by Julie Taymor, a then-unknown but now-renowned theatrical artist who was soliciting students for an eight-week maskmaking course. Beuth soon began spending large amounts of his spare time sculpting masks in a workspace in his Manhattan studio apartment, first using Silastic and later neoprene.

After completing work on In the Valley of the Mist, Beuth began to expand his purview as a sculptor, studying for twelve years under Santa Monica-based artist Jonathan Bickhart and developing an additional specialty in the medium of cast bronze.